“I’m good.” Jagger looked around. “I like this place.”
“Thanks. It’s not much compared to the house but I love it.”
“It’s you,” Jagger said. “And that makes it everything that matters.”
My cheeks heated. “Let’s get the boxes out of the closet and bring them out here.”
He followed me down the short hall, past the guest bedroom and into my room, small compared to my room at the Hawks’ house
I opened the closet and reached for the boxes that had been there ever since I’d moved in and gotten them out of the storage unit Bram rented to hold some of our parents’ furniture, just in case I wanted any of it later.
Bram didn’t want it. He said it wasn’t his style but I think it was more about the fact that he didn’t want the reminder of what had happened that night in the car.
I handed the first box to Jagger.
“How many are there?” he asked.
“Four.”
“Stack them on top.”
“You sure?” I asked. “They’re heavy.”
“I’m sure.”
I stacked the boxes on top of the each other and followed him back into the living room.
He set them down, then pulled out his phone. “Pizza or sandwiches?”
“Pizza or sandwiches?”
“This is your lunch break,” he said. “You need to eat.”
“Maybe pizza?”
“You got it.”
I opened one of the boxes while he placed the order and was almost bowled over with visceral memory: the bleak days in my teens when I’d first discovered the boxes and was trying to make sense of what happened to my parents.
Back then Bram and I had lived in a little house off Main Street because Bram insisted I was a kid and kids needed a yard. I’d hoarded the boxes in my room, looking through the papers in secret, convinced I could find the answer to the way things were — the way Bram was — if only I looked hard enough.
The smell inside the boxes took me right back to that place and I had to take a deep breath to shake loose the feeling.
“Mind if I put on some music?” Jagger asked.
“Nope. You can pair with the speaker by the TV.”
He scrolled through his phone and a minute later angsty alternative rock started to play from the speakers.
He sat next to me on the floor. “Anything in particular you want me to start with?”
I shook my head. “Pick a box, any box.”
He removed the lid from one of the remaining three boxes as I pulled the first stack of papers out of the box open in front of me.
The sheer quantity of paper, documents I’d already been through more than once, was overwhelming. “I don’t even know what we’re looking for.”
“I don’t either,” Jagger said, bending his head to read from the stack in his hands. “But I think we’ll know it when we seeit, especially now that we know we’re looking for a Russian connection.”